British Circuit Posters
Six British circuits — two wartime airfields, three country-house parks and a grassy hollow in Kent — each drawn as a technical track map poster in four editions.
Silverstone
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Brands Hatch
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Cadwell Park
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Donington Park
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Oulton Park
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Snetterton
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Runways and country-house parks
Many British circuits grew up on one of two kinds of ground. After the Second World War, the empty airfields were the obvious place to race: Silverstone’s first official race, in 1948, ran on the runways of a bomber base, marked out with oil drums and straw bales, and in 1951 Snetterton’s first course was laid out on an airfield that had been home to an American bomber group. The other ground is older: the parkland of country houses. Donington Park, paved by 1933, is considered the first permanent park circuit in England; Cadwell Park runs through the park of a manor house long since demolished; Oulton Park opened in 1953 on an estate that appears in the Domesday Book. Brands Hatch is neither: a grassy hollow in Kent, paved in 1950 as the first purpose-built circuit in England after the war.
Corners that remember
Their names still carry the past. Silverstone’s Hangar Straight is named after the airfield’s largest hangars, which stood beside it. At Cadwell Park, Barn, the last corner, was named after a real barn that stood beside it, and the Hall Bends are said to follow the old entrance road to the hall. At Oulton Park, Lodge Corner runs past the estate’s surviving eighteenth-century gatehouse, and at Donington Park a garden bridge built in 1834, under whose narrow arch the cars once raced almost in single file, still stands at the edge of the track.
Six circuits, one wall
Side by side, they show how different British racing can be: Silverstone, flat and fast, with just 11 meters (36 ft) of elevation change in the whole lap; Cadwell Park, folded into a steep-sided valley of the Lincolnshire Wolds; Brands Hatch, a natural amphitheater where, from almost anywhere on its banks, you can see a third of the circuit. Start with Silverstone, where the first race of the very first world championship for Grand Prix drivers was held in 1950, or with the circuit you grew up visiting, and build the rest of the wall around it.